EILEEN COOPER 50
10 June - 10 July 2003
LONDON Main Gallery

                    

Eileen Cooper: A Birthday Tribute
Eileen Cooper celebrates her fiftieth birthday with the opening of this exhibition. Some would see the occasion as the perfect opportunity for a retrospective display of older work, with perhaps some dashing examples of latest developments thrown in. In fact, the show is almost entirely of new pictures made over the last eighteen months to two years, and resolves into three main types. There are the studio paintings, the watercolour and pastel images on wooden panels, and the coloured drawings. Three different surfaces - canvas, board and paper - allowed Cooper to alternate her mark-making and keep the imagery and the formal language of its depiction fresh. Yet the different areas of her practice overlap to a considerable degree, and it is more useful to discuss the work thematically. Since her mother died at the end of September last year, Cooper has spent six months drawing. Her work has always been celebrated for its bold graphic qualities, and the decision to concentrate on drawing was an instinctual return to the base and source of her art. It was essential to re-connect with the deep springs of her art to make sense of her loss. This she has triumphantly managed to do in a body of work which stands out among the varied achievements of more than 25 years of distinguished art-making.

As a consequence, the exhibition is driven by drawing, and at its heart are the three large coloured drawings Journey, September: Laid to Rest, and Chariot. In Cooper's case, drawing has resolved such a lot - not just in emotional terms, but as regards the formal development of the images. The drawing has derived its strength from memory and imagination, but also from a renewed interest in direct observation. (Look at the wayside flowers, for instance.) Cooper has also taken great and evident delight in the depiction of the winding roadway, and made of it a strong and convincing decorative element. In the stony backgrounds there is something of the remembered bleakness of the Peak District. (Cooper was born in Glossop, Derbyshire.) In Chariot, the genres fruitfully intertwine - we have figure drawing, landscape, and still-life objects lying forgotten on the road. Are these meant to be easily interpreted? What do the shoes, for instance, represent? It is often a mistake to look for a single meaning in a Cooper painting. Here is not the explicit sexual connotation of Meret Oppenheim's famously bound high heels - Cooper's aim is more to suggest the liberation or relaxation felt on kicking off one's shoes. Similarly, in the studio pictures, the orchid is exotic, sexy, luxurious, yes - but it also has a beautiful and intricate appearance which was required as a complex visual addition to Cooper's paintings. A cactus could be seen as phallic, or symbolizing a hard and prickly path, but here it is quite likely that it actually suggests both these things while having been chosen for its shape as a pictorial component. Does the ladder connote the sexual climax or high aspirations, or is it simply a piece of household equipment press-ganged into use because the look of it suited a painting's needs?

The overt subject of the studio paintings is self-proclaiming: a playful examination of what the activity of being an artist is all about. The four studio drawings belong to what might be called Cooper's 'wood grain' period, in which the texture of the floor lends a heightened emotional note to the images. The tiger and the acrobat stand for imagination. Of the tiger, Cooper comments: 'I love the idea that the studio is the kind of place you might get a tiger walking through.' Here is the unfettered primacy of the imagination; as in some dangerous children's story (The Jungle Book?), the tiger is coming out to play, and we don't know who will end up hurt. In Tail of the Tiger, it is the beast which is ridden and controlled by a dreamy-faced nubile. The acrobat swings imploringly from the ceiling, but however beguilingly he balances his body, the artist ignores it and paints only his head. In other images, the acrobat becomes the disaffected male model, boy or man. The boy's bare drawing board might be construed as a comment on what can or cannot be taught. (And this by a respected teacher of many years standing; Cooper still teaches one day a week at the Royal College.) 'I do all my thinking through making', she says, which is the basis of what she tries to communicate to her students. The same message is imparted to us as viewers of her paintings, drawings and prints.

Traditionally it's the model who is naked in the studio, but Cooper has reversed this, and depicts the artist unclothed, brush in hand. But at the same time she has dispensed with the model and focuses attention on herself, at once the artist and model. There is, however, always a feeling in these pictures - as there is in Cooper's conversation - that working from a hired model might be due for a revival, for more attention is certainly being paid to direct observation, with consequently a lesser reliance on imagination. The figures are set in illusionistic space articulated by closely-observed still-life elements. And at the same time, these are paintings about painting: 'I've always been obsessed by the rectangle and squashing things into it. These pictures are to do with that also - rectangular doors and windows and paintings within the work.' The room is a nursery as well as a studio, for the activities done therein are, after all, similar - both to do with nurturing: motherhood and the making of art. Cooper's work has always been very closely autobiographical, for it has been her particular skill to make public statements out of private experiences. But as her children have grown up, the family ingredient has become less apparent in her work. Now, with the death of her mother, the generational advance is even more pronounced. Perhaps the subject matter will evolve in new ways as a consequence.

The wood panels which Cooper has recently begun to paint upon are primed with gesso to give them a bit of a 'tooth' to grip the pigment. The finest of them depicts a big-shouldered nude figure in the act of riding off but pausing, to confront the viewer with a direct and unblinking bright blue gaze. The landscape setting is simplified but expressive: grey pebbles, golden sand and rose-pink folded hills. (This effective colour combination echoes the change in palette noticeable in this group of pictures as a whole -- a new range of delicate hues, predominantly pink and peachy, serving to widen the emotional resonance of these images. Previously Cooper had been best-known for the robustness of her colour.) In another image, the tortoise, symbol of wisdom and great age, bears witness. The way in which the oils in this show have been painted also marks a departure. Cooper uses paint straight from the tube, thinned perhaps with a little turps, but never fattened with added oil in the medium. The surfaces are there fore drier than we have come to expect, less luscious perhaps, but more thought-provoking because more restrained. Another feature of these paintings is the profusion of still-life elements included along with the dramatis personae - the poignantly squeezed paint tubes, the bunch of keys, the hammer and the scissors (both making their first appearance in the Cooper repertoire), the parasol, the hand - mirror, high-heeled shoes and handbag. These latter emblems of personal adornment and finery have been discarded on the roadway, reminding us that possessions are a mere burden that we can't take with us when we die.

In the oil All Roads Lead., the more familiar props have been joined by a walking-stick and glasses, quietly indicative of age and infirmity. And in this painting, for the first time in a Cooper image, one of the figures is clothed. It is as if the artist had finally lost her innocence and been expelled from the Garden of Eden - the coat is intended to cover a nakedness of which she is now self-conscious. Cooper is suddenly very aware of the figures in her paintings being naked and defenceless. Whereas before she felt that clothes would tie the figures down too closely to a particular place or time, she now feels she can make them timeless with classic garments. These images are about a rite of passage - from life into death - and owe something to a documentary Cooper watched recently about the Viking Valhalla. At the same time as being utterly serious (what is more serious than the death of a loved one?), the imagery embraces the playful. It has always been Cooper's intention to combine extremes in this way. Likewise, she chooses not to pin down her subject matter too closely to a story: for its greatest impact, her work needs a certain fluidity of interpretation. Traditional Christian iconography finds further echoes in this work. (Cooper has no specific religious belief, but owns to strong moral standpoints.) Besides the Expulsion, we find references to the Pieta, when the Virgin Mary mourns over the dead body of Christ, often cradled in her lap. This is referred to most obviously in the drawing entitled September: Laid to Rest, in which three figures (two female and one male) bear a body which looks remarkably youthful to an unspecified resting-place. (Here again the flexibility of the narrative is maintained: the carried figure could easily be a child rather than a parent. And the luminous figure on the right of the group - could this be the artist, her sister, or some angelic apparition? In a very real sense, it is all of them.)

The figure riding on a donkey, which occurs in Journey, Wilderness and All Roads Lead., suggests other Biblical subjects - the Flight into Egypt, when Mary and Joseph smuggle the baby Jesus into safety, and the moment when the grown Jesus enters Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, riding on a donkey. The image also has a more direct personal source in a photograph of Cooper's mother on donkey-back, taken during an infrequent holiday abroad. Cooper is quite prepared to employ imagery borrowed from the art of other times and places, and adapt it to her own requirements. Indian miniatures have long been a potent source of inspiration, together with Romanesque wall painting, Japanese prints and sculpture, Egyptian art and such modern masters as Gauguin and Beckmann. She alludes to a particular interest in proto-Renaissance art: 'I sometimes think of myself as one of those medieval painters, all attention to detail and Mediterranean colour.' The fluidity of symbolic meaning is enhanced by the intended interchangeability of the figures. Sister, mother, artist, sons and husband can change roles at the drop of a paintbrush. In All Roads Lead.the naked mother with an umbrella is guiding or leading the daughter who protects herself with a raincoat now that the mother is leaving. Or it could be the other way round, with the roles exactly reversed.

This new body of work, with its highly-charged poetic imagery, has a deliberate ambiguity which enriches it no end. It's simplified, but concise and comprehensive forms, and gloriously heightened colours, encompass a genuine spiritual content not often found in contemporary art. Perhaps Cooper will finally shake the Expressionist tag so long attached to her work. 'I think I'm too fiddly to be an Expressionist - the paintings are too structured', she says. And as for narrative, she is most interested when it is continued and extended over a number of works, and especially when it leads to something unexpected and perhaps subversive. 'It is shocking when new images arise. You don't really know where they come from and then they become very important.' Eileen Cooper as visionary artist? This recent work, besides being intensely moving and humour-filled, has a breadth of image-invention which bodes well for her future.

Andrew Lambirth
London and Bath: March-April 2003